Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  Vanessa opened her eyes expecting to see someone in hospital attire. Instead it was a burly man in a rumpled suit. He introduced himself as Detective Mike Lambert with the Colorado State Police and said he needed to talk to her about the death of Myrna Cunningham.

  Vanessa tried to put him off, explaining that she was exhausted and worried about her sisters and asking if he would please come back another time.

  The detective ignored her request, and Vanessa listened in disbelief while the man theorized how Myrna Cunningham ended up dead. As he saw it, Vanessa had taken the elevator up to Mrs. Cunningham’s house, switched off the elevator so no one could follow her, and wrestled frail, elderly Mrs. Cunningham over the deck railing. Then Vanessa left the house via the path down the mountain and hid when she saw the postal van approaching.

  Vanessa closed her eyes and drew in her breath. After all she had been through, the last thing she needed was to be accused of murder.

  “What makes you think that Myrna Cunningham was murdered?” Vanessa asked the man, who was built like a prizefighter and was obviously accustomed to intimidating people.

  “We consider all possibilities,” he said, “but it’s difficult to believe that a woman like her would commit suicide.”

  Vanessa couldn’t take the man’s words seriously. A woman like her. The detective had no idea what sort of a woman Myrna Cunningham was. He didn’t even know her real name.

  “Most likely it was an accident,” she pointed out.

  Briefly Vanessa told him that she and her sisters had come West in search of their father’s birth mother, who was born Henrietta Worth, but after she killed a man in her hometown, she ran off and changed her name. As Hattie Polanski, she had been sent to prison for a killing a bank teller in Hayes, Montana. After giving birth to their father, she escaped from prison and ended up in Colorado. When Hattie/Myrna learned the daughters of the son she had given birth to in prison were looking for her, she invited them to her home, drugged them, had her oversize employee carry them down to the old mine, and left them all there to die. “Now unless you plan to arrest me, I need for you to leave. I am exhausted and worried and wish I’d never set foot in the state of Colorado and don’t plan on saying another word to you or any other law enforcement officer until I have an attorney at my side.”

  When the detective left, Vanessa wanted more than anything to call her mother and daughters, but she knew she would be undone by the sound of their voices. And then she would have to explain why she was so upset. And she couldn’t do that. Not now anyway. Mother would think she had to fly home. Lily and Beth, too. Their summer would be ruined.

  She even thought of calling Scott. But what would she say to him? That she had almost died? That she missed him? That she would never forget the good years they had shared? And that she regretted the bad years, which were just as much her fault as his?

  The orthopedic surgeon came to tell her that Ellie had come through the surgery just fine. Dr. Bernard was a chatty man with a Southern drawl and looked much too young to have all that medical training.

  Vanessa stayed with Ellie in recovery, holding her hand and caressing her face. Ellie was pale as a ghost, her hair matted, her lips so cracked they were bleeding, but she was alive and her bones would mend.

  It was almost seven o’clock when Vanessa followed as two aides wheeled Ellie—in a bed with her leg in traction and tubes in her arms—to a regular room. A nurse got Ellie situated, then turned a chair into a bed of sorts for Vanessa and provided her with a blanket and a pillow and a snack.

  When the nurse left, Vanessa patted Ellie’s cheek. “I’ll be right here if you need anything.”

  Ellie mumbled something.

  Vanessa leaned closer.

  “Georgiana?” Ellie whispered in a raspy voice.

  “She’s in a room in another part of the hospital. She was dehydrated but is feeling better.”

  Just as Vanessa was about to settle into her makeshift bed, Dr. Bernard popped in to check on Ellie one last time before he called it a day. Vanessa watched while he leaned close to Ellie’s face and asked, “How are you doin’, Miss Ellie?”

  Ellie managed another mumble.

  “We got that leg bone of yours put back together,” the youthful surgeon told her, “and it should be almost as good as new in a few months or so, and you’ll be able to do all the things you were doin’ before—like dancin’ and runnin’ away from the hordes of good-lookin’ men who are courtin’ your favor. Now, if your leg gets to hurtin’, you have your sister call the nurse, and I’ll be back to see you bright and early in the morning.”

  Vanessa wished she had brushed Ellie’s hair and cleaned her up a bit. Ellie would hate for anyone, but most especially a handsome doctor, to see her looking her worst. Vanessa wanted to tell Dr. Bernard that her sister was really a beautiful woman and a fashion plate to boot. But that would be silly, she supposed.

  The surgeon turned around and put a comforting arm around Vanessa’s shoulders. “Get some rest,” he said. “She’s goin’ to be just fine.” Then he pointed at the makeshift bed, indicating that Vanessa should make use of it, and left.

  When Vanessa awoke, daylight was peeking through the blinds. She went to Ellie’s bedside and stroked her sister’s forehead.

  Ellie opened her eyes. “Hi.”

  Vanessa kissed her. “Hi. Do you know where you are?”

  “Yeah. In a hospital. With my leg in traction.” Ellie’s voice was so hoarse that Vanessa realized it was painful for her to speak.

  Ellie grabbed Vanessa’s hand. “Why were we in that dark place?”

  “It’s a long story, honey. I’ll tell you about it when you’re feeling better.”

  “The pain was horrible.”

  “I know,” Vanessa said. “You were very brave.”

  “Is Georgiana okay?”

  “Yes. You both drank a lot of Hattie’s wine, and it was drugged.”

  “What happened to my leg?”

  “Later,” Vanessa said.

  Ellie reached for Vanessa’s hand, her eyes filling with tears. “You know what the worst thing was?”

  “What?”

  “I was afraid that I was going to die before I could tell Georgiana that I was sorry.”

  Vanessa washed her face and brushed her teeth and combed the tangles from her hair before making her way to Georgiana’s room.

  Georgiana was still asleep. Vanessa stood watching her for a time. She wondered if Georgiana would ever look old. She still looked like a young girl. A sweet young girl. Vanessa wanted to wake her and tell her that Ellie was sorry, but maybe that should come from Ellie herself.

  Vanessa kissed Georgiana’s forehead, then went back to Ellie’s room. Someone had left a bottle of orange juice and a newspaper on the dresser. She drank the juice, then returned the narrow bed back into its chair configuration. She wondered about breakfast. Did nonpatients receive food trays? If not, she was going to have to go begging for coffee and sustenance. Their luggage and handbags were still in police custody. She had no money. No clean clothes. No makeup.

  She reached for the newspaper, and her heart skipped a beat when she saw the picture of Hattie on the front page. Actually it was a photograph of a painting of Hattie that portrayed a handsome, imperial-looking woman standing beside a large bronze sculpture of an eagle. The headline read “Founder of Aquila Industries Found Dead.” Vanessa scanned the article, then went back and read it word for word. Basically it said that Myrna Cunningham, the reclusive founder of Aquila Industries, was found dead by a rural mail carrier yesterday morning near her mountain estate. A family member speculated that Cunningham fell to her death while taking a steep path with numerous switchbacks that led to her mailbox, a morning ritual for Cunningham, who was known to be remarkably physically fit for a woman her age. Law enforcement officers, however, had not ruled out the possibility of foul play. Cunningham’s business interests in the state and beyond were vast and included Bitterroot Mines. She was the mo
ther of U.S. representative Randall Cunningham—whose father was Myrna Cunningham’s second husband and died of a heart attack when Randall was two years old. The boy was later adopted by Myrna’s third husband, James Cunningham, an Olympic swimmer who died in a plane crash in 1989. Now serving his third term, the Colorado congressman was said to be exploring the possibility of entering the race for state governor and was thought by many political observers to have presidential ambitions. Myrna and James Cunningham had three other children: Carter, who was Aquila’s CEO; Katherine, who ran the family’s charitable foundation; and Rachel, who was a geology professor at the University of Colorado and served on the Aquila board of directors.

  The article also listed the names of six grandchildren and concluded by saying that those present at the scene of the accident were Myrna Cunningham’s longtime employee and companion, Wilhelmina Kiel, and three women who were believed to be guests in the home but whose names had not been released by law enforcement authorities.

  Vanessa sat with the newspaper in her lap. She wondered if this was truly all the information the newspaper had on the recent events at the Cunningham home. How innocuous the article sounded. No mention was made of the “guests” being rescued from an abandoned mine underneath Myrna Cunningham’s mountain home. Or Myrna Cunningham’s plot to murder her “guests” with the help of Wilhelmina Kiel.

  Vanessa tossed the newspaper back on the dresser and had just decided that she was going to have to go begging for breakfast and coffee when there was a knock at the door. Hospital personnel gave a perfunctory knock before pushing the door open, and Vanessa didn’t bother to respond.

  No one entered and there was a second knock.

  She got up from the chair, retied the sash of her robe, and shuffled to the door in her cloth slippers.

  A nice-looking, middle-aged man in a gray suit was waiting. “Vanessa Crowell?”

  Another detective, Vanessa decided. This one was older and better dressed than the one from whom she had undergone the third degree yesterday, an experience that had left her feeling less than kindly toward law enforcement officers.

  “I am she,” she responded in as calm a voice as she could summon, her hand firmly on the door handle.

  “I’m Randall Cunningham. Could we go someplace and talk?”

  Thirty-One

  IT took Vanessa a couple of heartbeats to realize she was looking at Hattie’s congressman son. Or rather Myrna Cunningham’s congressman son.

  “I’m not sure I want to talk to you,” Vanessa said, aware of curious stares from the nurses’ station. Probably they wondered why a handsome, well-dressed man was talking to a woman in dire need of makeup and suitable attire.

  “I’d really appreciate it if you would,” Randall Cunningham said, his expression and voice imploring. “I flew in from Washington as soon as I learned of my mother’s death. I talked to Willy and the detective in charge of the investigation, but there’s a whole lot I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Vanessa said, her tone deliberately cool. She realized that Randall Cunningham had just suffered a loss, but she had no condolences to offer.

  She took a step back into Ellie’s room.

  “Please,” he said, grabbing hold of the door she was about to close. “I realize that you and your sisters have been through a bad time—”

  “A bad time!” Vanessa interrupted in an angry whisper. “My sisters and I have been through hell!”

  Randall Cunningham let go of the door and took a step back.

  “Look,” Vanessa said, lowering her voice still further. “I realize that probably none of what happened to me and my sisters is your fault—at least not directly so—but your mother had every intention of leaving us to die in that abandoned mine. And I was interrogated by a detective yesterday who seems bound and determined to blame me for your mother’s death.”

  “Please,” Cunningham said, his brow creasing. “I need to understand what happened out there at Eagles Nest.”

  “It’s not a pretty story, and I doubt if you want to know the truth of it any more than that detective did.” Then she added, carefully enunciating each word, “Your mother tried to murder my sisters and me.”

  The congressman ran a hand through his hair in a frustrated gesture that reminded Vanessa of her father. This man looked much like her father, with the same chin and wide brow and coloring, which shouldn’t have been surprising. Randall Cunningham was her father’s half brother. But her father had been raised an orphan, while this man had been raised to be president of the United States.

  “The detective said that Willy was pretty much a zombie when the state police brought her up out of the mine,” Randall Cunningham said. “They brought her here and she was admitted as a psychiatric patient. When I talked to her, she was half out of her mind and not making a whole lot of sense but kept saying what ‘nice ladies’ you and your sisters were, and that my mother was your grandmother because she had a baby that she gave away back when her name was Hattie, and that baby grew up to be your father. Willy also told me about the article that appeared in the Denver newspaper and how excited she was when my mother told her to call the sisters and invite them to Eagles Nest. I just finished reading that newspaper article, which left me more confused than ever. Apparently my mother felt very threatened by what you and your sisters had unearthed about her past, but what was in that newspaper story seemed innocuous. Mostly I learned that you and your sisters lived in New York and found a letter with a Montana postmark and launched a search for your father’s birth mother. I gather that woman turned out to be my mother.”

  The newspaper story. Vanessa had bought a newspaper at a drugstore in Helena and read it on the way back to the hotel. Had that been just two days ago? Or was it three?

  A wave of light-headedness came over her. She closed her eyes and leaned against the doorframe. “I need something to eat,” she said, “and I have no money since the police have not seen fit to give me my purse. Or my luggage.”

  Randall Cunningham took her arm. “Food first. We’ll sort out the rest later.”

  Vanessa glanced back at Ellie. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully in spite of her injured leg being in that ungodly contraption. Vanessa let the door close behind her. “I can’t be gone long,” she told him.

  He pulled out his cell phone and gave a breakfast order to someone named Paul, then led her down the hall. Conscious of the curious stares of those around her, Vanessa hoped they weren’t going far, because hunger and caffeine deprivation were about to get the best of her.

  Randall Cunningham took her to the break room next to the nurses’ station. Shortly a young man in suit and tie arrived carrying a tray laden with food from the hospital cafeteria—oatmeal, fresh fruit, bacon and eggs, and biscuits and honey. A young woman, also in a suit, followed with two large Styrofoam cups of coffee. The congressman thanked the two and dismissed them.

  Cunningham sipped coffee while Vanessa ate everything in sight and asked for more coffee. She would remember this meal all her life, she realized, not because she was in the presence of a congressman or because the food was noteworthy, but because this was the breakfast she ate the day after she and her sisters were given a second chance at life.

  Vanessa pushed away the tray. “Okay. The newspaper article. We didn’t want to embarrass Hattie,” she said, not bothering to keep the irony from her voice, “so we didn’t tell the woman who interviewed us at the Hayes newspaper office anything about Hattie being in prison or having a child out of wedlock. We knew she had been an inmate at the women’s prison in Deer Lodge, but we didn’t know what crime she had committed. And we knew that she had a baby while she was incarcerated there, and that the baby was our father. The note in the Bible was from your mother thanking her aunt for taking in the baby. That note was postmarked Deer Lodge, and it was that postmark that launched our search.”

  Vanessa gave Randall Cunningham a condensed version of what his mother had told them during that sur
real session in her office. She told him how and why his mother killed the son of the man who owned the mine where Hattie’s father had worked. How Hattie met a boy named Josh Polanski while hitchhiking, and how she and Josh attempted to rob a bank in Hayes, Montana, and during the bank robbery one of the tellers shot and mortally wounded Josh, and Hattie killed a bank teller. How Hattie was sentenced to life in prison but after the baby was born managed to escape.

  “Josh Polanski was the father of that child—of our father,” Vanessa explained. “Hattie didn’t tell us much about what happened after that. Or maybe she talked on after we drank the drugged wine that Willy served us and we lost consciousness. Apparently, though, your mother realized from the moment she saw the article in the Denver paper that her secrets were threatened. She feared our sleuthing might lead to a scandal that would end your political career and decided it was more important for you to run for president than for my sisters and me to go on living.”

  “Willy indicated something to that effect,” the congressman acknowledged. “She also said that she didn’t want to take you and your sisters down into that old mine, but she had always done what my mother told her to do because my mother had been good to her and she loved her more than anyone else in the whole world. And then Willy said that after she had carried all three of you down there, Mother locked the door with her still inside.”

  He folded his hands and placed them on the table, and a stern look settled onto his face. “It seems to me that since my mother apparently went back and opened the door, she must have been just trying to scare you and your sisters.”

  Vanessa shook her head. “I don’t know who opened that door. But I am certain that your mother intended to get rid of us permanently, and I can’t imagine her changing her mind. Your mother had a lot to hide.”

  Randall Cunningham was silent for a minute as though digesting Vanessa’s words. He looked past her as he said, “The detective who spoke with you yesterday checked out some of the things you told him with Montana law enforcement agencies. He learned that a man named Edward Sedgwick, who was the son of the man who owned the Coal Town mine, disappeared back in the summer of 1945 and has never been heard from since. But the detective hasn’t been able to verify that there was a bank robbery and trial in Hayes that same year.”